When the Trent Lott
controversy exploded onto the newspapers and weblogs back in December,
many liberals claimed that the Republican Party’s racial demons
were bigger than just one man. Republicans and conservatives, the argument
went, have won votes by exploiting racial animus, particularly in the
South.

Some
go so far as to suggest that Republicans are explicitly racist, as when
the NAACP ran an advertisement that implied George W. Bush tolerated the
lynching of James Byrd or when Al Gore suggested that strict constructionist
judges would return us to the days of blacks being considered three-fifths
of a person under the Constitution. Others, like liberal commentator Joshua
Micah Marshall, argue instead that the GOP “as a whole benefits
from the use of racism or race-tinged wedge issues in certain parts of
the country.” Both subsets of this argument are supported with the
usual litany including Lott, Willie Horton and Bob Jones.

Now, this is a viewpoint
that on its own terms is supported by some suspect underlying assumptions.
For example, one can argue that Republican ascendancy in the South has
more to do with the Bible Belt supporting the social conservatism of the
Christian right than with race; moreover, to the extent that the GOP has
absorbed former Dixiecrats, it has also generally moved them away from
public support of racist policies. But it is also important to note that
liberals impose standards on conservatives and Republicans that they do
not themselves meet.

Case in point is
the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia. Estrada is a successful lawyer who served as assistant
U.S. attorney in New York under Rudolph Giuliani, clerk for Supreme Court
Justice Anthony Kennedy and in the office of the solicitor general in
the Clinton administration. He has the support of a bipartisan majority
of senators and if confirmed many believe it will only be a matter of
time before President Bush nominates him to become the first Hispanic
American on the U.S. Supreme Court. But a majority of Democrats, led by
Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-SD), are blocking the president’s
choice.

Of course, Daschle
and his colleagues motivated by politics and their liberal judicial litmus
tests, not ethnicity. They are concerned by Estrada’s work for Justice
Kennedy and membership in the conservative Federalist Society. But if
Republicans filibustered the nomination of a qualified Hispanic candidate
named by a Democratic president, they would surely be rapped for insensitivity
at best and outright bigotry at worst.

When John Aschroft
opposed the nomination of African-American Judge Ronnie White to a federal
judgeship – one of only two black Clinton judicial nominees he opposed
during his entire Senate tenure – critics portrayed his opposition
as essentially racist in nature. There were those who accused Sen. Bill
Frist (R-TN) of playing to racist sentiments when he included criticism
of Marion Barry in his 1994 stump speech. Republican investigations of
illicit 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign contributions from Chinese nationals
and the Cox committee investigation of possible security breaches between
the United States and China were said to be motivated by prejudice against
Asian-Americans; Republican-supported initiatives to halt welfare payments
to noncitizens, particularly illegal immigrants, were said to be motivated
by animus against Hispanics.

Yet the Democrats
can prevent a floor vote on the nomination of a Hispanic judicial nominee
without the same critics objecting that this could be perceived as bias
against Hispanics. Ted Kennedy can give speeches inveighing against Gerald
Reynolds, now an assistant secretary of education running the department’s
Office of Civil Rights, or Clarence Thomas, without anyone questioning
his commitment to racial equality.

Over two years ago
when Linda Chavez’s nomination to become secretary of labor was
aborted due to revelations that she had housed – and possibly employed
– an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, I wrote an article asking
why this was not an unacceptable manifestation of racism and xenophobia
on the part of Chavez’s critics. After all, illegal immigration
was deemed an unacceptable racist wedge issue when Pete Wilson brought
it up in the 1990s. Those who favor reduced immigration also must constantly
deal with the allegation that they are motivated by anti-Hispanic prejudice.
Yet it was perfectly acceptable for Democrats to sink a Hispanic nominee
by bringing up an issue involving an illegal immigrant. Just to be clear,
I do not – and did not at the time – consider bringing up
the issue of whether Chavez complied with U.S. immigration laws to be
an illegitimate issue. But I do believe that if the party affiliations
of those involved had been different – if a Democratic administration
had nominated a liberal Hispanic who was opposed by Republicans for housing
or employing an illegal immigrant – the charges of insensitivity,
racism and xenophobia would have been leveled.

Liberals and Democrats
do not just get a free pass to oppose minorities nominated by Republicans
– they are allowed to do so in terms that would certainly, and fairly,
invite criticism if they had been used in similar circumstances by the
right. For example, Estrada has been attacked for being insufficiently
Hispanic. Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus
intoned, “Being Hispanic for us means more than just having a surname.”
Even though Estrada immigrated to the U.S. from Honduras and learned English
as his second language, Angelo Falcon of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense
and Education Fund dismissed his biography as "concocted, invented
Latino imagery." (Columnist Deroy Murdock quipped that “Estrada's
critics would not be mollified even if he swapped his black robes for
a serape and wore a sombrero on the bench.”)

Purveyors of racial
groupthink also took issue with Chavez’s authenticity, due to such
grievous offenses as being a conservative Republican, opposing bilingual
education and being married to a Jewish man. Clarence Thomas has endured
even more vicious attacks and referring to him as some kind of “Uncle
Tom” is par for the course. More recently, there have been questions
about the blackness of Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security
Adviser Condolezza Rice. Singer Harry Belafonte referred to them as “house
slaves.”

These statements
may not represent anything approaching majority opinion among liberals.
But if we are to judge liberals and Democrats by the same standards many
of them would impose on conservatives and Republicans, this is not enough.
It is a fact that the Democratic Party as a whole benefits from this kind
of racial resentment and institutionally does little to discourage it.
Such leading Democrats as Bill Clinton and Al Gore employ divisive rhetoric
as a tool for securing minority voter turnout. Daschle did not walk out
on an anti-Estrada press conference when Mendendez argued the nominee
was somehow ethnically inauthentic.

When it comes to
exploiting race for political purposes, sadly neither political party
is pure. However, Democrats frequently claim that such tactics are exclusively
the Republicans’ preserve while they alone occupy the moral high
ground. This is bunk. Even a cursory glance shows that the standards Democrats
try to hold Republicans to is not one they themselves have reached.

W.
James Antle III is a Senior Editor for EnterStageRight.com
and a primary columnist for IntellectualConservative.com. He is a freelance
writer from Boston, Massachussetts.